The Fire That Consumes

Out here in remotest rural France, seated beside a roaring fire, I feel the warmth of all the good vibes that have been bestowed on me this year - the generosity, support and encouragement from my friends and family. Yet I'm

happy to let their kindness burn up in the wood stove of my ambition. This is my conceit, to be the fire that consumes rather than warms.

I leveled that harsh criticism at a very dear friend of mine recently, someone who's done more to support me these past few years than any other person. At the time, harsh criticism seemed the only way to express my gratitude. But now I'm one dear friend poorer.

That's why I'm determined to get it right this tim e, and pay proper tribute to Martin and Sally for the loan of their cottage in Capelle-lès-Hesdin. Martin, my publisher, is a good friend whom I've known for years. He keeps a steady course and always manages to sail through rough seas with an even keel. Two years ago he rescued me from the clutches of hell, with the offer of a publishing deal for GORILLALAND, and has helped steer me between careers in wildlife conservation and publishing.

Sally's an extraordinary woman, a solicitor who chooses to put her formidable powers of persuasion to rescuing battered women when she could be making a fortune elsewhere. That's why her friendship means so much to me. If it weren't for the two of them - not just their generosity but their understanding - I'd be sizing up the beams.

The idea was to set me up somewhere secluded where I could concentrate on completing the manuscript for PIRATES, my next novel. So, here I am, alone in their 17th Century house in northern France, filling the hours, as I have been doing for the past three weeks, with everything it is possible to do in a place like this, except write my manuscript.

It's not often I experience such solitude. There was the time in 1981 when I spent a few weeks on an island in Lake Ontario, trying to write a play. Then in 1986 at The Quarry at Tuesley Manor in Surrey, and as recently as December 2009 when I spent two weeks alone in a cabin upstate New York. Each occasion was an act of faith and kindness on the part of a friend who believed in my talents. And each time I trusted the results would prove their generosity. But thirty years later and I'm still unable to make isolation work for my writing.


"There were all the technical problems. But the fire and the night and the stars made them all seem small."
- Ernest Hemingway


I just put down Hemingway's True at First Light, and I'm feeling his style. Long sentences that repeat words, sometimes with just one jaded word between them, meandering descriptions of African mornings, hunting prowess, and seemingly harmless conversations with local safari guides. No one comes closer to describing the Africa I know than Papa Hemingway.

Coincidently, the thing that has occupied more of my time than anything else while in Hesdin is my effort to set up a couple of gorilla safaris for some Hollywood clients. They're prepared to pay top dollar but they've just not given me enough time. Communications has been a big challenge. I bought a useful device made by Hwayei, an elegant little white tablet that fits into the palm of your hand. It uses a micro SIM to generate a wireless Internet hub that connects all the computers within range. Bandwidth is seriously lacking though. There's virtually no fast network in this little backwater - not for Orange customers that is. Add the hassle of topping up credit when it runs out, as it just has, when the nearest shop's a half-hour bike ride away, downhill.

It's as peaceful as an ashram here. But for birdsong, lowing and the wind through trees, all is quiet, though my heart pounds like a native drum in the forest. Why such anxiety in so tranquil a place? Is the house haunted? Yes, there are ghosts here, but they're all ones I brought with me. That's just it... I'm never alone.

From time to time I receive curious visitors: the lean and elusive hunting dog that scampers on to the lawn for a shit, the birds that chatter from every branch, and

a family of rabbits straight out of Enid Blyton. But I have never seen any people, not even from the busy farm next door. I hear machines and cows all day and night but, even when I go a roaming with my wireless hub in one hand and my iPad in the other like some lost prophet with asymmetrical laws, no one ever materializes. No need to worry about making impressions then.

I no longer try to make a good impression anywhere but in my novels. I've been conducting myself with dignity, as Kigongo suggested, which is new for me, but I don't give a damn what anyone thinks. All I really want is to retreat to the African wilderness where, like Papa, I'll need do nothing more than listen to wood pigeons and wind in dry grass, and write novels. It's where I feel most at home.


To anyone who has spent a lifetime traveling to the far ends of the earth, as I have, home is an abstract idea. For me, any sense of belonging is always fleeting. Not that I don't crave it. I do, with all the fibre in my heart, body and soul. But I'll throw my hat anywhere I'm allowed to spend the night, and call it home.

This little cottage in Capelle-lès-Hesdin feels like home. There's a simpler vibe here. I'm inconspicuous. Live and let live; love and let love... It's another reason I am so grateful to Martin and Sally, they've given me a home these past three weeks.

It's a peculiar house. The angled windowsills and steep roofing all warn of heavy winter storms. Yet its age and isolation tell another story. It was built around the time Queen Nzinga was on the throne in Angola, pitting the Dutch against the Portuguese, and destroying the Kingdom of Kongo. Thank you France for taking a back seat for the first three hundred years of European colonialism. You were busy fighting the English, I know, and building little houses for your peeps to live in. I understand
.
It's sometime later and I find myself again cozied up to a blazing fire, sitting with my wireless keyboard on my lap and my iPad on the coffee table next to a half-finished bottle of Black Label, the current issue of The Economist, my moleskin note pad, two phones - one for France, one for Britain - my reading glasses, a small pipe and small stash to burn therein.
There's no better soundtrack for this setting than Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5, Fourth Movement. Nothing soothes a homeless heart like sentimental Teutonic strings. Yet the beat goes on.

I'll be leaving in a day's time. Pity. Thank you Martin and Sally for lending me your ancient cottage to write my book. I wish I could have made more of the opportunity, though it has been a balm to this tortured soul, even if I didn't manage to complete my manuscript. I will soon.

How strange the fire recalls the African bush: the last few embers steadily dwindling, along with the contents of a bottle of Scotch, and a sense that other creatures are out there hunting, staying up much later than is sensible - early rise creeping up with the dawn - but reluctant to sleep until the last flames have burned down. And after all the wood is consumed, there is still warmth.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Rue de l'Obled, Capelle-lès-Hesdin, France

The Silverback of LA

When drinking Harvey Wallbangers and smoking bongs, alone on a terrace in the Hollywood Hills, always check what you lift to your lips and for what purpose. It gets confusing after a while. The consequences can be rather unpleasant.

I suddenly find myself in an empty house, sheltered from the Santa Ana winds by the steep slopes of a weather-beaten canyon, watching lizards scurry out of shadows into fleeting warmth, and listening for the loosening sands of another gofer avalanche. With the sun rising from one ridge mid-morning and setting on the next mid-afternoon, it's like Alaskan winter time in this place. 

Sound too travels in strange ways. I hear conversations that bounce off the irregular contours of the canyon walls, disguising their location - malicious machinations that their perpetrators think no one else hears. Boiling cauldrons of pulp simmer in the canyons late until the night, like festival candles...

At last I'm in bed with the entertainment industry, having sex with a seductive screen idol who can't remember my name. At least I can testify that at this point in the negotiations, one doesn't believe one's selling one's soul to Mephistopheles. 

You soon see the warning signs: the producer who wears an impossibly trim goatee and laughs a lot, the director of development who moves uncomfortably around in his plush leather chair, the rotund company partner who flashes you an imperceptibly brief glare, during which you think you hear extraneous voices. You leave wondering whether or not, unbeknownst to you, your sleeping orifices were just surreptitiously probed by the Forces of Darkness. 

How far will it take me, this affair with the Black Dahlia? If the sex is good, good things will come. How long before I have my own line of safari apparel..? Maybe I don't last the afternoon, as the entire side of Nicholas Canyon breaks loose and crumbles on top of me. I hear little land slides sidling gravity's way. There is nothing up there, I checked. It's just foreshadow and verisimilitude in allegiance with the Fate Clowns. This after all is the stuff of entertainment.

Gorilla Goes to Hollywood

It was 1991, on a cold November afternoon in London, when I sat down to watch Gorillas in the Mist for the very first time. My heart was pounding, even before the title sequence began. I could hardly contain myself. 

Nominated for five oscars and well received by the critics, no doubt it was a great movie, but I had other reasons to be excited about the Dian Fossey biopic. I’d just received a phone call inviting me to interview for the position of UK director of the Digit Fund, the organisation she founded.

Not many positions offer a feature-length Hollywood motion picture as a guide for interview. But, in spite of the fact that I had grown up in Africa, I’d never met a wild gorilla nor visited Rwanda, so this film, shot on location, was my introduction.

The silver hairs on my back stood on end as I watched the opening scene, which faded in to the strains of Maurice Jarre’s sumptuous score. A DC 3 carrying Dian Fossey, played by Sigourney Weaver, descends between the majestic Virunga volcanoes, and lands in an airfield next to the mountains.

I could not have known then that I was watching scenes from my future life, a life that would be quite unlike the one I led then, and that years later I would arrive at that same airfield, aboard movie mogul Barry Diller’s helicopter.

SILVERBACKS ON THE SILVER SCREEN

Hollywood and gorillas : the two could not be farther apart. One showcases the culmination of human imagination, the other, the complete lack of it. Yet there has always been a symbiosis between them.

Since Hollywood’s Golden Age, movie makers have pitted beast against beauty and turned the gorilla into a box office sensation. Ingagi released in 1930, was the first to trade heavily on the suggestion of sex between a woman and a gorilla, and it’s success spawned the mother of all gorilla movies, King Kong, which earned $2 million during its initial release in 1933, putting RKO Radio Pictures in the black for the first time since they started making movies. It ranks among the greatest motion pictures of all time.

Hollywood has been kind to the gorilla. Unlike chimpanzees and orangutans whose screen exploits have attracted scorn from animal rights advocates, gorillas themselves have largely been left out of the picture. Instead, they’re usually played by long-armed actors in an ersatz gorilla getups, known as gorilla men, people like Steve Calvert, Ray Corrigan, and Bob Burns (the most beloved).

In later years as production standards improved, ape actors like Dan Richter and Peter Elliot perfected their craft to match the ever more sophisticated suits they were being asked to climb into.

Some of the best make up and effects artists have made their reputations crafting believable movie gorillas. Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen are among those from the Golden Age, while in recent years Rick Baker and Stan Winston are credited with many of the modern silverbacks on the silver screen.

Nowadays, CGI and motion capture technology gives gorilla men like Andy Serkis, star of the 2005 remake of Kong, the freedom to give more convincing performances. Still, who isn’t moved when Peter Elliot, playing Tarzan’s adopted chimp father, gets shot in Greystoke, ("C'est mon père!") or when Dan Richter throws the bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Other blogs have adequately dealt with the subjects of gorilla movies and gorilla men, which I won’t go into, except to say, thanks Hollywood for turning the gorilla into a screen idol. It made my job saving them a whole lot easier.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My personal association with the movie business began one sunny summer morning, shortly after I started my job as director of the Digit Fund. I received a call from Warner Brothers in London. “I believe you wrote to Sigourney Weaver requesting a meeting,” said a young woman, which I confirmed. “Well, she can see you this afternoon, at the Barkley Hotel.” I quickly jotted down the address then examined my scruffy attire: jeans and a t-shirt. They might have at least been given enough notice to dress for the occasion.

A couple of hours later I was inside the second floor suite I’d been instructed to go to. It was plush, decorated in a classical style, and overrun with assistants catering to the needs of a queue of journalists waiting to see Ms Weaver. I spotted her through the crowd, seated in front of a large Alien 3 poster, answering questions from the British entertainment press about her latest movie.

A pretty, young assistant ushered me into an adjacent room and told me I could use the phone while I waited. “You’ll never guess where I am...” is clearly the call she thought I’d make, but I was cooler than that. The next time the door opened, I expected it to be her again, but it was the movie star herself, unescorted.

“Hello,,” said Sigourney, shaking my hand, “I’m sorry I’m late.” She looked stunning, dressed in a bright orange 1960s top, with large, strategically-cut holes arranged around it. Her hair was quite short - as she hadn’t had much of a chance to grow it since playing a bald Ripley - and it was done in tight brunette curls that accentuated her diamond-cut features.

We talked for twenty five minutes about her role as honorary chair of the charity, and my fundraising and awareness raising activities. I told her we had recently changed the name to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. “I will have to work harder now,” she said, smiling. ”People identify me closely with Dian.” I was startled by her loyalty to the cause. She was determined not to let Gorillas in the Mist become “an unwitting memorial to an extinct species.”

That was the first of many celebrity appointments I kept in my twenty-year career as a conservationist, including many more with Sigourney, but I will always cherish that first face-to-face encounter I had with a genuine Hollywood movie star.


DAWN OF MAN

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick, and with whom I had been friends for years, opened up a world of possibilities for the gorillas. He also gave me my most cherished contact in the movie business.

"I think Roger Caras who was Stanley's VP at the time would be happy to be interviewed, explaining how the ape sequence was arranged in 2001," Clarke wrote in a fax to me. Clarke, who rarely left Sri Lanka, introduced me to Caras by fax. We met for lunch at a posh London restaurant. Caras struck me as one of the last true gentlemen in the movie business. As one time vice president of Hawk Films, Kubrick’s production company, in due course he gave me and introduction to the great filmmaker himself.

Though we never actually met, Stanley Kubrick subsequently made two financial donations to the Fund, both in response to editions of our newsletter, Digit News. Then, on March 6th 1999, I sent him a fax, as I had done to many other high-profile supporters that day, informing him of an impending air strike by the Zimbabwean air force on the town of Goma, and the collateral damage it might cause to the gorilla habitat. Not that my fax had anything to do with it, but the next day, Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack.

On a happier note, my association with Clarke also led me to Dan Richter, who played the ape Moonwatcher in the “Dawn of Man” sequence in 2001. He arrived one day at the London office saying Clarke had recommended us to him. A few months later I would take him and his son, Will, to meet the real gorillas in Rwanda. It was to be the start of a lasting friendship.

In a thank-you letter that she wrote to Arthur Clarke, Sigourney said, “You probably don’t recall meeting me at my parents, Pat and Liz Weaver’s when I was eleven. I took a ‘Playboy’ magazine out of your briefcase and read it. I’d never seen a ‘Playboy’ before so your visit is indelibly recorded in my memory!”

Her gratitude was in response to Clarke’s sterling efforts, through his contacts in the Space industry, to acquire imagery of the gorilla habitat from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had been taken on two Space shuttle missions in 1994. It is a story I’ve reported elsewhere in this blog, but I mention here because it was pivotal to the Fund’s next encounter with Tinsel Town.

One day, another ape actor, Peter Elliot (pictured above), also turned up unannounced. As the foremost ape actor of his day, he was compelled to run rampage through my office, climbing on to my desk, ripping up my cigarettes, and throwing stationery against the walls. He gave a surprisingly convincing performance as a chimpanzee, even without a suit. Lucky for him considering the mess he made.

Peter had come with an urgent message: Paramount Picture was making an ape movie, to be based on Michael Crichton’s adventure novel, Congo, and if we got in early enough, we might be able to secure their support for the cause.

After rushing out and buying the paperback, I quickly discovered something quite serendipitous about Congo. It involved detailed satellite imagery of the gorilla habitat in central Africa, the same as we'd just acquired from NASA/JPL. I called producer Sam Mercer and offered him a bit of verisimilitude for his movie.

“WHERE YOU ARE THE ENDANGERED SPECIES”

My first visit to Hollywood, in the Spring of 1994, followed on the heels of that call. I can remember the feeling of elation that came over me as my co-director Jillian Miller and I drove up Melrose Avenue to the Paramount lot in a convertible, with the sound of big band swing playing on the car radio. Thanks to Peter Elliot’s timely heads-up, the Fund was in at the ground level with Kennedy/Marshal’s production of Congo. And, in the course a few short days, we would be subjected to every manner of Hollywood schmooze.

On one occasion, while we were seated in a restaurant on Rodeo and Wiltshire, having lunch with Congo associate producer Michael Backes, and his publicist Beverly Magid of Guttman Associates, Dick Guttman himself arrived at our table, with a female friend in tow. “I was wondering if you could give a ride to my client,” he said, “She’s staying close to your hotel. May I introduce you to Patricia Hearst. ” Low and behold it was Patty Hearst, aka Tania, the famous newspaper heiress, who in 1974 was kidnapped by Symbionese Liberation Army. 

Ten minutes later were were driving up Wilshire Boulevard together, with Patty warning the consequences of breathing too much LA air, and insisting we close all the windows and turn on the air conditioning. Never one to miss a fundraising opportunity, I asked her about making an appeal to her family foundation. “Oh, you won’t get any money from them,“ she laughed. “Campaigners are always on their ass. They own half the Californian coast, you know.”

It’s important to be assertive in Hollywood. The industry expects nothing less of it’s solicitors. It wasn’t easy convincing Paramount that we were the cause on which to pin Congo. At one point, while Kennedy/Marshall were prevaricating over a plush gorilla doll, I asked Sigourney to phone Kathleen Kennedy and urge them along. “We'd appreciate not being blindsided like that,” said producer Sam Mercer.

But gorillas are not generally polite, and when their situation gets desperate, yes, I get pushy. The big bohunkases needed a champion. Hence being called an “asshole” by Michael Crichton, and a “hustler” by Dave Gilmour, were to me badges of honour. My intentions are good. What's your excuse?

Paramount Pictures eventually paid for $10,000 for our space images, even though NASA/JPL had given them to us for free. We also ended up with all the box office returns from Congo's London premier at the Odeon Leicester Square, and an on-pack promotion to adopt a gorilla that went out with the video, raising nearly $150,000 for gorilla conservation on the back of the movie.

However, despite it's success at the box office, the critics panned Congo. I’ll never forget Douglas Adams stomping out of the cinema after the film had ended, and bellowing at the top of his voice, “WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT!” Roger Ebert was the only critic to give Congo a thumbs up, citing it as “a splendid example of the jungle adventure story,” a quality that was not lost on me.

GORILLA MAKERS

Hollywood legend Ray Harryhausen is someone who knows the jungle adventure story better than most. I first met the special effects guru at an event in Paris in 1999, where he was being honoured with a Jules Verne Lifetime Achievement Award. We discovered we shared a passion for hairy apes and immediately hit it off.

On my return to London, he invited me to dinner with his wife Diana at their home in Holland Park. Diana Harryhousen, I learned, was a descendent of David Livingstone, which was evident from the many water colours displayed on the walls of their Georgian house, painted during the great explorer’s Zambesi Expedition. 

Ray led me up the stairs to his attic where he kept scores of stop-frame animation characters from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Clash of the Titans, films that made his name in special effects. It was a rare privilege that left me at a loss for words. Ray couldn't say enough about how much he loved the gorillas. He recalled his early days in the business, and how thrilled he was when they hired him to work on Mighty Joe Young, alongside Willis O’Brien, who was responsible for the special effects in the original 1933 King Kong. "Willis wasn't there much. And by doing most of the miniature set wizardry myself, I saved lots of money."

After dinner, I showed off my new Palm Pilot. At that time digital hand-held technology was still largely unknown to the world. While seated around the coffee table, I demonstrated how I could look up Ray’s work on the IMDB database. “I'll tell you who to look up,” he laughed, “Gustav von Seyffertitz.”

Within a few seconds I’d found him, a German actor of the silent era, who’d lived to the ripe old age of 80. “He’s sure been in alot of movies,” I said scrolling down the page. “Over a hundred, going all the way back to 1917.”

“And he didn’t even start until he was middle aged,” said Ray.

“Shall I fax this page to you?”

“Go ahead,” he chuckled. Suddenly his fax machine began spouting yards of paper, and Ray just stood there laughing and shaking his head at my absurd use of the technology. That evening was one the most memorable in my career.

Like many of the Hollywood legends I’ve met over the years, Ray became a regular donor to the cause. Gorillas owe much to the movie business for their survival. Gorillas in the Mist created public enthusiasm that snowballed into a global campaign. Congo galvanized that support. And later appeals allowed me to work with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Daryl Hannah. Suffice to say the big bohunkases have benefited enormously from their iconic screen image.

I’ve also benefited personally, attracting celebrities and movie executives to my safaris. Barry Diller (pictured), Diane von Furstenberg, Bryan Lourd and Christian Louboutine were among those on just one gorilla trek I led on New Years Day 2005. That was the time I flew in Diller’s helicopter. The following year I took Tom Brokaw, who invited me to join him on the Today Show in return, and the year after that, Tony Robbins, who also flew in by helicopter. "Hollywood people are carnies with good teeth," my good friend Michael Backes used to say. I say bright, erudite, talented people are the best to show around places you love.

But, while all these exploits provided a touchstone for show business philanthropy, one thing I’ve learned in my twenty years working there, is that in Tinsel Town, content is king. There’s nothing quite like owning your own content. It was that crucial realisation which would lead me into the next phase of my gorilla career.

800lb GORILLA! 

In a flip to the usual script, six years ago Turner-prize winning director Steve McQueen hired me to lead him and a film crew into the heart of the Congo jungle. He wanted to make a movie about coltan, the valuable ore used to create a plethora of electronic goods. On this occasion it was the filmmaker who took me to the subject matter, as I was to make my first visit to the jungle proper, the primordial cathedral where I would received the flame to a new career.

Toting two 35 mm cameras and bags of gear, we enlisted the services of twenty one porters, a chef and a priest, and set off on the expedition on foot into the forest. During the many hours spent drudging through the mud and the steaming heat, the idea for my debut novel was born. 

It took me another five years to write Gorillaland, but using the knowledge I had gleaned from my exposure to the movie industry, I attempted to evoke the bygone era of the jungle adventure story, and write a bestseller that was destined to be a box office hit. 

“In the best tradition of Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler, Cummings sets his adventure in the strife-ridden Congolese jungle. Blood diamonds, kidnap, inter-tribal warfare and natural disasters form the background for a cast of adventurers, NGO campaigners, warlords, boy-soldiers, UN Peacekeepers and one of the most wicked villainesses readers will ever encounter. Gorillaland with its story based on fact is set to be a global bestseller.” 


I'm headed back to Hollywood next week, my first visit in over five years. This time I’m going armed with something more powerful than King Kong. This time I’m bringing my own 800lb gorilla. Gorillaland's going to Hollywood!

What's In A Name?

“All humans are exactly equally close cousins to all gorillas.” - Richard Dawkins

Last week researchers at Cambridge University announced they had deciphered the genetic code of the gorilla, the penultimate Great Ape genome sequence to be completed (they’re still working on the bonobo’s). The findings will shed important new light on the human condition. 

Richard Durbin of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who led the study, said, "I'd like to think that in the next 20 or 30 years we will get a deeper understanding of what happened genetically in our evolutionary history, and of how those genes affect the brain and other properties that make us modern humans." 

It turns out that, although on average humans are closer to chimps, 15% of our genome is closer to that of the gorilla than the chimpanzee, including a gene that enables us and the gorillas to hear better than other apes. 

At last, we’re beginning to see the forest for all the phylogenetic trees. We’re now one step closer to understanding how we came to stand upright and think great thoughts.

Ten million years ago the common ancestor of humans and gorillas made her night nest in the Congo River Basin. She may have been bipedal and even more humanoid than gorillas: something akin to a “Humarilla.” There is no fossil evidence to prove her existence because her bones could not sustain the ravages of deep forest acidity that disintegrated them over time, leaving us speculating about this crucial period in human history.

What we do know is that towards the middle of the Late Miocene, Africa’s equatorial jungles contracted and our arboreal existence soon gave way to stomping the terra - the start of the hominid migration to the savannah. The fossil evidence in and around the Rift Valley at sites like Odupai, Lake Turkana and Awash confirms this.  

Either the gorillas chose to remain in the forests or returned after an unsuccessful bout on the plaines. We may never know. But presently all the sub-species of both the Eastern and Western gorilla - Gorilla gorilla gorilla, Gorilla gorilla diehli, Gorilla beringei graueri, and Gorilla beringei beringei - can be found in a band of equatorial forest in Africa, between the Bight of Bonny in the west and the Albertine Rift in east. The area encompasses ten gorilla range states: Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, the two Congo republics, Rwanda, and Uganda. 

What Do They Call This Place?

It occurred to me that the gorillas might benefit from having one name to describe the region in which they range. Many place names in Africa have been changed more than once throughout history. The tendency of European explorers to name the landmarks they “discovered” after their own royalty was understandably loathsome to the locals, as was the tendency of post-colonial dictators to name them after themselves. 

Following independence new names were given to many lakes and towns, honouring African heroes and history. Changing Murchison Falls to Kabalega Falls, for instance, transfered the eponym from a Royal Geographic Society director who had never even visited the continent (yet considered it a tedious place to explore) to the Bunyoro King who fought the British back across the Nile.

The Bantu convention for place names is to use a U as the prefix. On that account the land of the gorillas would be Ugorilla. But adhering to this convention is too anthropocentric and, for a population of apes, too contentious. Indeed, many traditional African legends regard their local apes as humans who fell from grace, and this folklore remains ingrained in their cultures today, even amongst the diaspora. 

Furthermore, this misconception harks back to European explorers who regarded the native people of the forests as closer to chimpanzees and gorillas than to themselves. “This is not only factually wrong,” says geneticist Richard Dawkins, “it violates a fundamental principle of evolution. A pair of cousins are always exactly equally related to any outgroup, because they are connected to that outgroup via a shared common ancestor.” 

It’s not an easy concept to grasp, the cladistic fact that gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans are not sufficiently different from us (we share 98% of our genetic makeup with gorillas) to warrant exclusion from the charmed circle in which we place the human species. 

Racism was endemic in our culture late into the twentieth century but it is now mitigated by the knowledge that all human beings originated in Africa. So too will speciesism decline as we come to understand that we are all in fact African apes. 

Gorillaland

I chose Gorillaland for the title of my debut novel because it recalls the Golden Age of African adventure, and acknowledges the original ape inhabitants of its setting, in the deep forest that was once the limit of the known universe.

As far as I can tell, references to a “gorilla land” have been made three times in the past. The first time was in 1876, when Sir Richard Burton published a two-volume account of his explorations along the West Africa coast during his governorship of Fernando Po, entitled Two trips to gorilla land and the cataracts of the Congo. Twenty years later, it was again used in the title of a Frank Merrywell adventure, in which the upright American college boy goes hunting ape and searching for the missing link in Africa. It last appeared in 1940, in a Fantoman comic, as the name of a place not unlike the Congo jungle where one Professor Wright leads an expedition to communicate with large, intelligent gorillas. 

Hollywood was once in love with Gorillaland. Following the release of King Kong in 1933, gorillas, cannibals and the Congo jungle became hot box office topics. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s the name Congo appears in no less than a dozen feature film titles. So, what happened? 

While I was researching my book I stumbled on an interesting inconsistency. In the six years between 1958 and 1964 TIME magazine published five cover articles featuring Africa’s emerging sub-Saharan leaders, Sekou Toure, Tom Mboya, Abubakar Balewa, Moishe Tshombe and Julius Nyerere. But in the twenty six years that followed, they published only two: General Ojukwe, the leader of the Biafran rebellion, and Idi Amin, Uganda’s dictator. The reason for this is the 4^th December 1964 issue featuring American missionary Dr Paul Carlson on the cover. He was murdered during the Simba Rebellion along with, it would seem, America’s enthusasm for the Congo.

Since independence the Congo has undergone a series of armed struggles and civil wars, resulting in the largest casualty numbers anywhere since World War II. It’s no coincidence that human conflict has surrounded the gorillas, especially the Mountain gorillas. Their habitats are located in some of the most fertile regions on the continent which are, as a result, the most densely populated.  

I am a gorillaphile (strictly platonic, I can assure you), the result of a career in gorilla conservation spanning two decades that took an immense toll on my life and steered me in directions I could never have foreseen. I consider myself an honorary ambassador to gorillas, and that it is my destiny in life to inspire empathy for their plight. 

But the award-winning conservation programme I helped design was about community-based initiatives for people, not gorillas. This was deliberate. We knew the best way to ensure the gorillas’ survival was to engender support among the desperately poor, war-ravaged people living adjacent to their habitats, and the only way we could achieve that was to demonstrate the value of gorilla conservation in real terms to those people. 

All our efforts were channeled into projects that sought to provide direct support to their communities, through micro-credit, agro-forestry, beekeeping and education, to name but a few, as alternative livelihoods to those that were destroying gorilla habitats. It was a plodding, long-term approach but the only one that made any sense. The population of Mountain gorillas has risen by 20% in the last two decades.

Between Apes and Angels

Gorillaland is also a state of mind. There is untold magic in those forests. I can remember once trekking through the Congo side of the Virungas. My friends Popol and Gapira were taking me to see a group whose incumbent silverback had recently been shot and killed by soldiers. Uniquely, a wild, un-habituated, ex-lone silverback had subsequently assumed leadership of what was a group of habituated gorillas (familiar to human presence). 

As we approached he became quite agitated and refused to allow us any closer, yet he could not convince the other gorillas to flee. He screamed and beat his chest and thrashed about the vegetation like a demon. Eventually we gave up our pursuit and sat down in a dried-up riverbed, a sunny, meandering rift through the otherwise pristine afro-montane forest. All at once the gorillas began to emerge from the trees and cross the riverbed, just a few metres ahead of us,: large, black, shaggy, charismatic mammals that moved silently and stoically like shadows. They wanted to see us. It was the very first time that I felt their kinship.

Ultimately, my experiences with gorillas allowed me to realise my dream of becoming a published author, which had consumed me since before I began working for them. In many ways Gorillaland wrote me. Accordingly, as a show of thanks to my hairy forest cousins who gave me a worthy vocation throughout my adult life, and the setting for a damn good yarn, I pledge to donate 10% of the my earnings from the book to protect gorillas in the wild. 

It’s even more personal now; I just found out my father may have dementia. One genetic difference that’s come up in the gorilla genome is the mutation that results in dementia in humans, but leaves gorillas completely unaffected by the condition. Hopefully, with these new studies, they’ll find a quick cure, in my dad’s lifetime. Short of that, relief is on its way to so many others who suffer. What is clear is that the welfare of the human race is in no small way dependent on the survival of gorillas. Welcome to Gorillaland!

Finding Gorillaland

Subject: GORILLALAND ...   surely that's not the title?

Dear Greg

I am responding to your email to Ed.   Ed passed it on to me because he is away in California for a few weeks.   He also passed it on because I happen to be from Dar es Salaam, have been to most countries in Africa (also lived in Botswana) and have been looking for a BIG AFRICAN NOVEL for a long time.   And of course I remember you from the Douglas days ... It's still hard to accept that he isn't with us any more.

I'm very intrigued by the synopsis you attached, and would very much like to read more.   Would you like to send it, and I will read and react as quickly as possible?

Many years ago I travelled through what was then called Zaire - quite an alarming experience!   We drove in from Central African Republic, then down to Buto (Buta?) where the local army Adjutant made us give him and his serjeant a lift to Kisangani, to find out why they hadn't been paid for 3 months ...    The roads were unbelievably bad.   I saw no gorillas - but the biggest bats you can imagine, and the smallest pygmies!   Then on into Uganda, which seemed almost sane and sensible after Zaire, even under Idi Amin.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes

Maggie Phillips

Managing Director
Ed Victor Ltd

It's five years (almost to the day) since I received that email from Maggie Phillips at Ed Victor Ltd.  To get the attention of one of the top literary agents in the world (Douglas Adams, Ranulph Fiennes, Jack Higgins, Nigella Lawson) was something in itself. Living up to her expectations was altogether something else. You be the judge as to whether I've written the "BIG AFRICAN NOVEL." Because, at long last, Gorillaland has landed!

Quest for a Plot

Ever since I was a child I wanted to be an author. My aspiration grew out of reading books by Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Graham Greene, about far away, exotic places. This fascinated me, mostly because I too was living in a far away, exotic place. 

Growing up in Africa and Asia bestowed me with experiences I was certain would make me a good writer. Yet it was those experiences that ultimately stunted my work, as I was convinced that retelling them would be enough to captivate readers. It was not. There’s no substitute for a good plot.

My quest continued until one day, I was accompanying some brainiacs through the jungles of central Africa, among whom was cognitive dissident John Perry Barlow. As we crawled on our hands and knees through the thick foliage JPB asked the question, "How do you get into the mind of a Congolese rebel warlord?" At that moment the story's antagonist was born.

But it was only after I spent some time in Walikale, in the Congo River Basin, that the novel’s central intrigue begin to emerge in my mind. Trekking through the jungle, crossing rivers and swamps, and fighting off swarms of insects in the windless heat, everyone quickly became drained and irritable. What would happen if we were all suddenly ambushed and kidnapped by a rebel warlord? How long could we cope with held hostage in such a harsh environment? 

My return from Walikale coincided with the start of a six-month, paid sabbatical, during which I was expected to write my novel. However, it was not until the last month that the story finally came together. Gorillaland was to be a jungle odyssey, full of unsavory characters - not just rebels, but also foreign and local operators - like the ones I had met or heard about in my travels, all tangled up in the heart of the Congo, which would itself be one of the characters.

Fact would also blend with fiction, though I feared some of the actual incidents I knew about could prove too strange for fiction. One terrible event, the abduction and subsequent massacre of tourists at Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, was vital to my research. First-hand accounts by the survivors would help me add authenticity to a situation I had thankfully never experienced myself. 

The name Gorillaland is somewhat deceiving. I fully intended for the story to include gorillas, those sentient monks of the forest with whom I'd been communing for so long. I was certain such charismatic creatures would be the easiest thing in the world to write about, but perfection in nature can be quite humdrum. Nonetheless I had all the characters I needed to get started. All I had to do now was write the book.

“All God's angels come to us disguised.”

After receiving such an encouraging email from Maggie, I expected to complete the manuscript in just a few months. Sadly though, at the start of 2007 my marriage of seventeen years began to unravel, and by the summer it had ended. I struggled on with my writing, while shifting from one friend's sofa to another one's floor, but work on my manuscript was piecemeal. Gorillaland was getting nowhere fast, and something had to give.  

Seeking a fresh start, I resigned my job, uprooted from London - my adopted home of over twenty years - and moved to Kampala. It would take a couple more years to get back on track, but at the start of the new decade I was living with Kigongo, the most wonderful woman in the world. 


Although we had no regular income we were a happy family, Kigongo, our puppy Amadeaus, and me. But the bills were mounting, and it was high time I got back to the one prospect I still had: Gorillaland. I bought a desk on the Gaba Road and began writing again in earnest.

Kigongo turned out to be my muse. She had a real knack for story-boarding, and helped me concentrate on what was most dynamic about the story, suggesting some characters that needed eliminating, as they were superfluous to the plot, while helping me strengthen others. 

All through the summer, we worked on tidying up the first seven chapters, following a revised, more elegant story arc than any of my previous drafts. I sent the results to my friend Martin Hay in London, who had just launched a new publishing company Cutting Edge Press, and anxiously awaited his reply. 

Dusk descends on the shores of Lake Victoria and my Australian clients, Margot, John and William have just arrived to start a three-week safari across East Africa. We're sitting down to dinner with Kigongo at the beautiful Jahaza Grill, surrounded by wild primates and rare birds, and my phone rings. I answer. “It’s actually quite good,” says Martin, "I'm prepared to send you a publishing deal." This is the call I've been waiting for all my life. 

From then on I worked ten hours a day, often by candlelight during Kampala's regular power cuts, and four months later, even before I signed their contract, CEP had the finished manuscript in their hands. It would take another year of content and copy edits, typesetting, and formatting, before the book was finally ready for publication. Still, in the fullness of time Gorillaland has landed. Enjoy the odyssey! I certainly enjoyed writing it.


Gorillaland by Greg Cummings - now available to buy here.

The Road to Buganda

“Tell the King that I am about to die for his people,
 that I have bought the road to Buganda with my life.” 
- Bishop Hannington, on hearing of his impending execution

Dark clouds had begun to gather above the towering escarpment, blotting out the fading light and bringing the day to an abrupt end. It was a grave portent, if ever there was one, not to continue up that road.

“Best we tackle the Mau Escarpment now, in the twilight boss,” said Sam my driver, as he geared down for the vertiginous gradient ahead, “to keep the engine cool.” Sam and I were on the Mombasa-Kampala Highway, driving north-west in the direction of the Ugandan border. “There’ll be some night driving,” he continued, “but we should reach Eldoret by 8 o’clock.”
Ever the optimist, I replied, “OK.” I was gladdened by the weather. Northern Kenya had been experiencing very dry conditions, and this was the first rain in over a month. It was undoubtedly a welcome relief to local farmers.

Initially, we had intended to stay at Lake Nakuru in the Rift Valley but, after circumnavigating the town’s main roundabout - a journey which took the best part of 30 minutes while the drivers of two matatus, parked side by side in the middle of heavy traffic, argued - we had decided to push on up over the escarpment. Our main concern now was the vehicle.

We had spent the previous night in Nairobi. In the morning, while I fumed about the cowboy who’d rented us the Land Cruiser, Sam tried unsuccessfully to mend its air filter, which caused the engine to overheat. Having been unable to leave until the afternoon, we now had no hope of covering the 660 kilometers between Nairobi and Kampala that day, and were simply trying to put as much distance behind us as possible before it got too dark.

Though the car's engine temperature remained manageable, the higher we climbed the escarpment, the more menacing the tempest outside grew. In no time we were being pummeled by a torrential downpour, cascading from the 3000-meter-high slopes of Mt Londiani like broad sheets of mabati roofing. It was only then we discovered the Land Cruiser’s windshield wipers and headlamps were also defective. Before long we were driving blind. 

In darkness, and with a veritable waterfall pouring over the windscreen obscuring the winding road ahead, it was impossible to continue. Sam tried tailgating a passing truck; its abundance of reflective panels would serve to guide us through the gloom. But the truck moved away too quickly, and we were unable to keep up. 

“Let’s pull over,” said Sam anxiously, “and wait for the rain to stop.”

“It doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon, rafiki,” I replied. “And I don’t fancy spending the night in the car, on the edge of a mountain road. But we have no choice, we must pull over..." 
As we sat there in the downpour, I began to reflect on the road beside which we were now precariously parked, the Mackinnon-Slater Road. Why had it been built in the first place? The quick answer is, to connect the Swahili Coast to Uganda, where told there was a great a kingdom at the source of the River Nile. 
I began to research the subject and discovered that in a few short years after this route was opened up, it had become the main road into the heart of Africa. Described in detail by its pioneers, and I have collected and woven together relevant quotes from a number of accounts of the journey, from between 1894 and 1912, in order to give you, the reader, a sense of what it was like for those early travelers who opened up the Road to Buganda.

Source of the Nile

King M'tesa of Buganda

The source of the Nile had been an inspiration to many for centuries, and the object of much curiosity since Speke discovered it's exact whereabouts in 1862. The Baganda, who lived in its headwaters, having been described variously as “the nicest [people] in all Africa… always happy and smiling,” “incurious before a stranger,” and who had “developed something like organized government,” were of great interest to Europeans. 

The explorer Henry Morton Stanley described M’tesa, the King of Buganda, as “an intelligent and distinguished prince, who if aided in time by virtuous philanthropists, will do more for Central Africa than fifty years of Gospel teaching, unaided by such authority, can do.” 

In 1875, Stanley published his now famous multiple-column letter in the Daily Telegraph, which proclaimed many great things about Uganda, but most importantly called on missionaries to come and convert the ‘Waganda’: “Now, where is there in all the pagan world a more promising field for a Mission than Uganda?...Here, gentlemen is your opportunity: embrace it! The people on the shores of the Nyanza call upon you.” 

During that time Uganda was to become the clarion call for all those wishing to bring to Africa what its first true explorer David Livingstone coined the ‘Three C’s’: Christianity, Civilization and Commerce. To begin with, little was known of the great kingdom Speke spoke of on the western shore of the vast inland lake that he had named ‘Victoria’, after his own monarch. The problem no one was quite sure how to get to it.  

 J.D. Mullins, in The Wonderful Story of Uganda (1908), explains the remoteness of the place: “African travel was still a great undertaking, whose conditions were known to very few; Uganda lay at the distance of at least seven hundred miles from the nearest missionary base; the temper of the chiefs whose territory must be traversed was unknown; communications were uncertain, the climate dangerous. Altogether there is no part of the world which could now afford such a 'leap in the dark' to missionary enterprise as did Uganda thirty years ago.”

The Northern Route
One thing European travelers to Uganda all had in common for the first two decades of journeying to Buganda was the road they took into the country. The old slave-trading route from the Swahili Coast to the interior started in Zanzibar, passed through Tabora, and then followed the southern shores of Lake Victoria to approach the Kingdom from the south. It had long been used by explores and missionaries, but in 1885 James Hannington, the bishop of East Equatorial Africa, on his first trip to Uganda, opted to try an as-yet-untravelled ‘northern route,’ which roughly followed the same course as the present-day Mackinnon-Slater road, connecting Mombasa with Kampala. 

Hannington saw many advantages to travelling this way: the new route was north of the boundary between German and British East Africa, linked his existing mission stations, and was shorter and seemingly healthier for the traveller. He was gravely unaware of the disadvantages. He did not receive the letter sent by Alexander Mackay, the Church Missionary Society’s chief representative in Uganda, insisting he wait to be collected by boat from Kisumu. King Mwenga, M’tesa erratic son and heir, suspected the bishop was coming to ‘eat the country,’ and, as the first person to use this ‘back door’ into the Buganda Kingdom, he had Hannington speared to death in Busoga for his impertinence. Thus, the bishop became the first of many martyrs in the cause of bringing Christianity to Uganda, while opening the present route from the coast.

The travails that followed Hanington’s execution, most notably those of Mackay and Captain Frederick Lugard DSO, the Resident and chief representative of the Imperial British East Africa Company in Buganda, have been well documented elsewhere. Suffice to say, their tireless efforts to provide an “antidote of imperialism to the malaises of savagery, paganism and the slave trade,” paid off when in November 1892, just three short decades after Speke’s discovery, the Union Jack was raised in Uganda, and Britain proclaimed a formal protectorate over the region. 

As the protectorate's first governor, Sir Gerald Portal made his inaugural visit that same year. In his book The British Mission to Uganda in 1893, he describes the scene as the human caravan left the coast for Uganda. 

“The long line of white-clad and black-skinned porters, bearing on their heads loads of every colour, size, and shape, slowly winds in a single file along the narrow path like a brilliant and gigantic serpent, now almost dazzling to look upon under the rays of the morning sun, now gliding in dark and mysterious silence through the cool shade of a wooded valley.”

J.D. Mullins adds, “Sometimes a thousand men, gathered together from Zanzibar, Mombasa, and the coast strip, would boisterously start off on a thousand-mile tramp, from which many of them never returned.” 

He paints a grim picture of the challenges they faced as they marched farther into the interior: “Heat like that of a furnace; yet a damp heat, producing physical exhaustion and mental depression...insects that fly, insects that crawl, insects that bite, insects infesting everything...centipedes, snakes, and beasts of prey...such thirst as no dweller in temperate climates can imagine; fever and other tropical diseases, recurring again and again.”

Zanzibar was eventually replaced by Mombasa as the preferred starting point, and upon arrival by steamer from Europe many found the coastal port “remarkably pretty.” C.W. Hattersley, in Uganda by Pen and Camera (1907), marvels at its “white houses of the Government officers, and traders, contrasting with the vivid green of the foliage, and the blue sky and sea,” and the way they “all combine to produce a very pleasing effect, as the sun is shining brightly almost every day in the year.” 

Ultimately, every traveller expressed relief at having left the balmy coast and entered the ‘Big Game Country’ beyond, a feeling well conveyed by Portal’s account. “As we walked along that morning over rich pastures and rolling downs, breathing mountain air exhilarating as that of the Scottish Highlands in August, the flagging spirits of the men, somewhat sulky at having been defrauded of their promised rest, rose at every step, until great herds of antelope were seen galloping away as the echoes were roused by some ringing - and usually obscene - Swahili chorus.”

Wildlife was much more abundant in those days, and sighting a rhino was a common occurrence, as C.W. Hattersly describes, in A Boy's Life in Uganda (1900): “One morning I was in the rear of the caravan, and was rather timid, as I had no gun, for there, only 500 yards away, was an enormous rhino with its calf. Providentially we were down wind, and the rhino cannot see far. Its brain is not highly developed, and it only goes for what it sees. We took good care to to attract its attention, and he did not even look up. If he had been disturbed, we should have needed long legs. He can run at a marvellous speed in spite of his unwieldy body. He charges anything and everything.”

Back then the journey from Mombasa to Nairobi took no less than one month, and was fraught with attacks by lions and native warriors. When Portal first passed through ‘Kikuyu Land’ in 1893, the settlement we know today as Nairobi was a highly-barricaded fortress called Fort Smith, with only a handful of white settlers living there. 

“One European marched in front, one in the rear, and one in the middle of the long line. The Wa-Kikuyu, as we knew, seldom or never show themselves, or run the risk of a fight in the open, but lie like snakes in long grass, or in some dense bush within a few yards of the line of march, watching for a gap in the ranks, or for some incautious porter to stray away or loiter a few yards behind; even then not a sound is heard; a scarcely perceptible 'twang' of a small bow, the almost inaudible 'whizz' of a little arrow for a dozen yards through the air, a slight puncture in the arm, throat, or chest, followed, almost inevitably, by the death of a man.” 

By the time Captain E.G. Dion Lardner arrived in Nairobi by train two decades later, the place had been completely transformed. “There are some 5,000 whites in the place, but most of them are non-residential. The entire population is about 20,000. The shops are well stocked, and there are few things you cannot purchase...The town is improving daily, and stone buildings are rapidly supplanting the original wooden shanties and tin erections. ...Nairobi has a great future as any rising city in the world.”

Although Nairobi served as an important supply stop, most travellers were eager to march on to Uganda, and soon they were traversing the Rift Valley, passing lakes Naivasha, Elementia and Nakuru. This had once been one of the most treacherous legs of the journey, where Maasai moran regularly raided their human caravans, and took a heavy human toll. But by the end of the 19^th Century, settlers had begun to arrive in the highlands in droves, and the Rift Valley was set aside for white farmers. 

Sir Gerald Portal paints an idyllic scene of the early days of the settlers: “As we sat that night in greatcoats round a blazing fire, we agreed that it would be impossible to feel ill in this district, and that if only communications with the coast were a little simplified, as they easily could be, no life could be more delightful than that of the first European settlers on these plains, with magnificent scenery on every side, clear streams of water, a practically unlimited extent of the richest pasture, any amount of what is now probably the best and most varied shooting in the world, and a complete immunity - at least for the present - from telegrams or 'interviews', circulars or companies, dinner-parites or duns.”

However J. B. Purvis, in Through Uganda to Mount Elgon, writing fifteen years later believes that it is “quite an open question whether the white man will ever be at home in the African Highlands; that he will ever be able to build up here, under the direct rays of the Equatorial sun, a strong, contented, self-supporting, permanent, white community.” 

Hattersley is much more optimistic and shows that by the turn of the century the white man’s presence in the Valley was already quite evident. “A number of settlers are turning over the ground and planting coffee, rubber, wheat, maize, and fibre for making ropes and rough bags. It is quite surprising to see the number of white faces at the various stations we pass, and in a few years' time it looks like being a white man's country. 

Purvis on the other hand asserts that, whatever the Highlanders achieve in Kenya, “We must not forget that Uganda is not, and probably never can become, a white man's country.” Lucky for Uganda!

As they climbed out of the Rift Valley, none of our early travelers failed to remark on the obstacle posed to their journey by the wintry Mau Escarpment, where Sam and I were still stuck, waiting for some let-up in the unceasing rainfall. 

Sir Gerald Portal: “It was rather difficult to imagine ourselves almost exactly on the Equator, as we shivered that night in bed, covered with all the blankets we could muster, on the top of which were heaped coats, flannel shirts, and clothes of any sort which might help to keep in the heat, while most of us went to bed wearing two or more suits of night garments besides.”

C.W. Hattersley:  “You would sometimes find the pail of water outside your tent had a covering of ice in the morning; and careless porters who had neglected to wrap themselves up in their blankets, or who had foolishly sold their blankets to obtain beer, were sometimes frozen to death.“

J. B. Purvis: “The cold was intense, the path, bad at any time, became slippery and difficult to negotiate; the rivulets became mighty torrents, and the porters were in despair. We coaxed, we threatened, we helped with loads, and carried men; but I believe a dozen succumbed as the result of that downpour.”

Eventually Sam attempted another tailgate. This time the lorry driver moved slowly enough for us to remain close behind him, and we all crept up the escarpment like a lost elephant. In time we reached the Nandi Plateau, where our journey seemed to go on blindly for hours through the rain. Just when Sam’s knuckles were beginning to look like those of a muzungu, he suddenly lit up. “Look, ahead,” he cried. Through the splashing windshield wipers we could just make out the distant lights of Eldoret, glittering on the moisture-laden horizon like submerged treasure. The rain had not yet to cease but at least now we’d be able to get out from under it.   

Victoria Nyanza

“I have seen the lake, sir, and it is grand!” - Frank Pocock, during H.M. Stanley’s 1875 expedition to Lake Victoria

Behold, the shimmering shores of Victoria Nyanza (Nyanja being the original name for lake), also known as Ukerewe, meaning the Eye of the Rhino, Nalubaale, Sango, and Lolwe.  Although Ptolemy spoke of Egypt’s Nile draining from a range of snow capped mountains that he dubbed the Mountains of the Moon, situated between two vast lakes in the middle of Africa, the first recorded account of Victoria came from Arab traders plying the interior for slaves, gold, and ivory. The Al Idrisi map from the 1160s, clearly depicts Lake Victoria, which it attributes as the source of the Nile. 

Our route completely bypassed Victoria, farther north towards Mount Elgon, but early travelers had to stop in the port of Kisumu and cross into Uganda via the lake in a canoe. 
J. B. Purvis describes the scene as the boats arrived to collect him: “Around a jutting promontory comes into view a picture that might have dropped from fairy-land… A flotilla of canoes such as we have never seen before, long and graceful, coloured red with earth, and prows adorned with the horns of antelope. Each vessel is propelled by twenty paddlers or more, who, the moment they catch sight of us, put additional zest into both song and work, and send their frail-looking craft skimming towards us.” 

According to Hattersley, “The European passengers generally sat in the middle of the canoe, the floor being composed of twigs laid across to keep passengers from the water which was always in the bottom of the canoe, and on the top of the twigs a lot of loose grass was spread. A rug on the top of the grass provided a seat or couch, and a bag of bedding or a tent as a rest for the back made it quite comfortable.” 

Even the lake journey, it seemed, as Purvis points out, could be quite perilous. “Nothing will induce our paddlers to face the open sea; they know its moods too well - its sudden squalls, its terrible storms that lash its ripples into mountainous billows that would at once engulf their cockle-shells. They make for shore at the first sign of 'weather' ; and, of course, the traveller must encamp on land at night. Here he makes the acquaintance of Africa's scourge, the mosquito; and more likely than not he will receive a nocturnal visit from the hippopotamus which in the day-time is too shy to seek exercise and sweet potatoes.” 

In time canoes were replaced by steamers, just as the human caravans were replaced by the Uganda Railway. The new mode of lake transport afforded J.B. Purvis the luxury of “stepping from his carriage on to a handsomely found Government steamer......Our journey across the Lake [is] in what is more like a trim, well-kept private yacht than a trade steamer. Everything on board is spick and span; and the dusky sailor-men move about in an alert fashion that speaks well for the kindness and ability of their officers.”  

Not surprisingly, our travelers’ first glimpses of Entebbe, the seat of colonial power in Uganda, after such an arduous journey from the coast, is the subject about which they wax lyrical the most. J. B. Purvis describes his first impression: “Beautiful, perfectly beautiful! is the verdict of whoever views Entebbe, Uganda's port, from the deck of the steamer. And, if possible, more perfectly beautiful when viewed from certain vantage-points on shore.

Captain E.G. Dion Lardner had scarcely finished his breakfast, “when some one shouted out 'Entebbe.' I ran round to the starboard side, where a beautiful view met my gaze. Wonder of wonders! could this be the fever-stricken spot which I had heard so frequently and vigorously maligned?

“Splendidly situated, overlooking the great lake, it appeared in the distance as a mass of trees, parks and gardens of flowers...The first thing to attract my interest were the fine golf-links, which do great credit to the noble sportsman who laid them out.”

Hattersley goes on to describe the warm welcome awaiting him and his family. "Everybody salutes you, most of them kneeling down to do it, and on all sides you hear, 'Olanyo?' '('How are you?') 'Wasuze olya?' ('How did you sleep?') 'Kulika nyanja!'  ('Congratulations on your lake-journey.') This latter really means, 'We are glad you have crossed the lake safely.'”

Welcome to Uganda!

“Our march the previous day had been, as usual, over monotonous, burnt, and barren plains, with occasional patches of cultivation round the villages; but now, without any graduation or preparation, we suddenly passed into land of fine trees, of endless banana gardens, of cool shade, and intelligent-looking, chocolate-coloured people, completely clothed from head to foot in graceful togas of bark-cloth.” So wrote Gerald Portal of his final approach to the kingdom.

After crossing the Ugandan border Sam and I stopped to celebrate at the old Malaba Hotel with ‘one, one’ (being on this occasion a refreshing Nile Special Beer each). It’s always a great feeling returning to Uganda. And while bark-cloth togas are now a thing of the past, and ‘chocolate-coloured’ a wholly anachronistic term for the 21^st Century, I would thoroughly agree with Sir Gerald Portal’s 19^th Century description of Uganda.

“Now, indeed, were we in a land of plenty; great bunches of sweet, ripe bananas were brought to us at every plantation, and distributed to the porters by hospitable villagers without payment being demanded or expected. To us, who had seen no green or fresh food since leaving Kikuyu, the luxury was inestimable; the only serious danger which now threatened us was that the whole caravan should so over-eat itself in the midst of this abundance as to be unable to proceed."  

Like Portal, Sam and I approached our destination from the northeast, crossing the Nile at Jinja.  Even crossing that raging river for the umpteenth time, it did not fail to inspire, and I was overcome by waves of nostalgia, recalling my visit as a child, forty five years earlier, when I first discovered this rich land at the headwaters of a great river. 
Upon his arrival, Sir Gerald also found inspiration from the source of the Nile. “At last, at 11 o'clock on the 12th of March, a muffled roar of water told us that we were approaching the frontier of Uganda, and in a few minutes a steep and rapid descent brought us to ...the very spot where the Somerset Nile leaves the lake, and, severing all connection with its parent by throwing itself madly over the Ripon Falls, sets forth alone on its 3000-mile journey to the Mediterranean Sea.” 
It was all downhill from there. All that remained of our 1,200-km journey from the coast, was our arrival in the Buganda Kingdom, the promised land.

Whereas Portal arrived “on the seventy-fifth day after leaving the deck of H.M.S. Philomel at Mombasa,” our journey, despite its hazards, had taken us just 3 days. Normally the trip is made with just a single overnight in Nairobi. We too would have been home sooner if our Land Cruiser rental hadn’t been such a lemon. Nevertheless, once again, through thick and thin, Sam Kagame had got me home safely, for which I must salute him. 

Sir Gerald too was compelled at the end of his journey to salute his porters, who without faltering nor murmuring had endured the journey “under a burning sun or through a chilling fog, over rocks and mountains, through swamps and rivers, with no certainty of anything to eat beyond a handful or two of the course black flour of mixed beans and corn which had been dealt out to him ...As it was, these half-savage Zanzibaris had performed a feat which could certainly not be equalled by even a picked battalion of beef-fed, cloth-clad Englishmen, and which would probably prove to be beyond the powers of any race of people existing in the world except the despised, crushed, and enslaved East African.” 

At long last, we’d reached our journey’s end: Kampala. Stanley was one of the first Europeans to enter what was then called Mengo, or Rubaga, which he described in Through the Dark Continent (1899) as “crowning the summit of a smooth rounded hill - a large cluster of tall conical grass huts, in the centre of which rose a spacious, lofty, barn-like structure. The large building, we were told, was the palace! the hill, Rubaga; the cluster of huts, the imperial capital!”

On first seeing the city at the turn of the century, J.B. Purvis was taken aback by the rapid strides “taken to bridge the gulf between primitive barbarism and Western civilisation.” Captain Lardener meanwhile, arriving three years later, was “rather pleased with Kampala, the ancient capital formerly known as Mengo, [which] today presents a very different appearance to what it did only a few years back, when it was described as a gigantic banana grove. Excellent roads have been laid out, and stone houses are being built everywhere. The local shops are doing a good business, and more traders are arriving constantly as the inhabitants are becoming richer, and, of course, the greater their civilization, the greater their requirements."

The two of us, tired and weary from our long journey, only caught a glimpse of the city, as we slipped off the old road on to the Northern Bypass towards the house in Kisaasi on the outskirts of Kampala where I lived. Compared to the transformation the road to Buganda had undergone in the past 126 years, the Northern Bypass was a welcome but trivial improvement to this time-honoured route. Even so, that last stretch of the road was an abiding song to me, the type herdsmen sing to coax their cattle back home. 

I think Henry Morton Stanley best summed up the feeling: “'Bring out bullocks, sheep, and goat's milk, and the mellowest of your choicest bananas, and great jars of maramba, and the let the white man and his boatmen eat, and taste of the hospitalities of Uganda.”

Quotations:

Sir Gerald Portal, The British Mission to Uganda in 1893 (1894) 

H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (1899) 

C.W. Hattersley, A Boy's Life in Uganda (1900) 

C.W. Hattersley, Uganda by Pen and Camera (1907) 

J.D. Mullins, The Wonderful Story of Uganda (1908)

J. B. Purvis, Through Uganda to Mount Elgon (1909)

Captain E.G. Dion Lardner,  Soldering and Sport in Uganda (1912)